Shabbat Kedoshim

Written by Student Rabbi Richard Jacobi Thursday, 08 May 2008

Yom Hashoah and Parashat Kedoshim

It was pure chance that my father was sponsored by his uncle to leave Germany in 1938, while my dad’s cousin Werner remained in Berlin and died in one of the death camps.

It was lucky chance that the freighter chartered on 14th May 1940 by Mrs Gertrude Weissmuller-Meyer, a non-Jewish banker’s wife in Amsterdam who was on the Board governing the orphanage, survived being strafed by German fighter-bombers. My father dived under one of the life-boats to avoid the bullets. The boat was reported sunk by the Nazi-controlled radio; only three days later did the BBC issue confirmation that the boat had reached Falmouth. Such chances show the fragility of life on the day when we remember the millions who perished during the Shoah.

Now my dad’s story is not the worst that can be told. But it is bad enough. His cousin,  his parents, and his grandparents were all victims. Another cousin and her parents survived but refused ever to speak of what they had endured in Westerbork and Belsen.

We Jews know the grotesque consequences of ideologies taken to their extreme and backed by political and military power. This College bears the name of someone who responded to such barbarity with humanity and courage. That is the mantle we are privileged to inherit and have the responsibility of taking forward. Since the war, many Jews have been at the forefront of other struggles to overturn other systems and their ideologies. Part of our privilege as students at Leo Baeck College is knowing that Albert Friedlander marched just behind Martin Luther King and Abraham Joshua Heschel from Selma towards Montgomery in March 1965. We are all fortunate indeed to stand on the shoulders of such giants.

Such predecessors offer us a model of being truly human, and the Kotsker Rebbe is quoted as saying: “Your holiness shall consist of being truly human, not angelic. God has plenty of angels.” [1] So, when we read kedoshim tiheyu (Lev. 19:2) in this week’s parasha, although the instruction is linked with the idea that God is holy, this may not mean that we are being asked to be God-like, but that we should be true to our best selves.

The nineteenth century German Jewish philosopher, Moritz Lazarus, picks up on this idea and takes it further. Commenting on a feature of this verse that is shared with Exodus 22:30, “You shall be people holy to Me…”, Lazarus says:

Whenever the duty or ideal of holiness is spoken of in the Torah, the plural is invariably used, because mortal man can attain to holiness when cooperating with others in the service of a great cause or ideal, as a member of a community, society, or “kingdom”. Of God alone we can say the Holy One. [2]

If Lazarus is right, then our task is a group one. By being part of a community or, indeed, of more than one community, we can attain and sustain the kedoshim of this week’s parasha. An effective group, a team, allows each person to be who they are, at their best. It utilises their strengths and has other people to do what each individual is weak at. It doesn’t focus on the weaknesses and what a person cannot do, because all this does is reduce self-esteem. An effective group, one might even say a holy community, buoys up each of its members, energises them, helps them to feel good about themselves so that they want to help bring about this feeling in others.

Today is also election day. In one of yesterday’s papers, the four main London mayoral candidates could read about the skeletons that newspaper claimed they had in their cupboards. I am not going to repeat any of the stories here, because that newspaper seems to suggest that politicians should be divine, perfect, unblemished individuals. The question for voters is not whether any candidate is squeaky clean and perfect, but whether they are truly human.

The question for me to answer is whether I am being truly human in the manner suggested by this week’s parasha: being respectful to my father and mother, keeping Shabbat, leaving my modern equivalent of the corners of a field for the orphan and widow. Am I fair in judgement? Do I pay promptly? And so on, and so forth.

Rabbi Lionel Blue has cautioned us against worrying about our own clothes and other people’s morals when it should be the other way round. Kedoshim tiheyu requires us to be focussed on our own morals and living up to our true selves. That will also drive us to worry about other people’s clothing and food. Lionel Blue was in the first class to graduate from Leo Baeck College. Eighty years earlier, Moritz Lazarus was the first President of the board of the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums of Berlin, better known to us as the Hochschule. The chain of tradition connected those generations; it is up to us to take it forward in a new and challenging era.